The ACORN story is not difficult to understand.  It is about a simple sting operation designed to reveal that a prominent organization routinely aids illegal activity.  When James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked into ACORN offices posing as a pimp and prostitute seeking to set up a brothel stocked by underage girls from central America, ACORN employees were only too happy to help – and no doubt, they had been only too happy to help real pimps and prostitutes in the past.

Did those employees commit a crime in offering to help O’Keefe and Giles themselves?  Of course not, because O’Keefe and Giles weren’t actually a pimp and prostitute.  All conspiracy crimes (which this would have been) require that there be an underlying criminal act – if no such criminal act exists, then conspiracy cannot be prosecuted.  This makes sense.  If you and I have a conspiracy to go to Baskin-Robbins, it is not a criminal conspiracy because no criminal act was ever in the offing.  If a guy solicits an undercover police officer posing as a 12-year-old girl online, that’s not a crime unless the state legislature has specifically carved out such a situation.  Similarly, in this case, no criminal act was in the offing because O’Keefe and Giles were never going to set up a whorehouse.

Duh.

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For once, the liars aren’t winning. For months now, Brad Friedman has engaged in a fundamentally dishonest campaign to save ACORN, by claiming that an inconsequential detail about James O’Keefe’s costume somehow erased the fact that ACORN employees sought to aid what they believed was a child prostitution ring.

Now, despite Friedman’s best (but still dishonest) efforts, ACORN is dead:

The once mighty community activist group ACORN announced Monday it is folding amid falling revenues — six months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is issuing a correction on the trivial clothing matter, but is continuing to accurately insist that O’Keefe “posed” as a pimp at ACORN: (more…)

On March 5, in a kicking-and-screaming, last-ditch effort to save her organization, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis wrote in BeyondChron.org of the “right-wing attacks” on ACORN by “undercover right-wing racist James O’Keefe,” repeating a Greatest Hits compilation of factually-defunct angles left has desperately drummed into the mainstream for the past five months, from the race angle to the doctored-videos angle.

On March 4, Stephen Colbert staked these angles to the pop culture turf in light of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recent report that the undercover tapes were “heavily edited,” producing a satirically-edited interview with Sean Hannity to deride James’ allged “deceptive editing.”  No mention that Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, was endorsed by the ACORN-related Working Families Party during his recent bid for re-election. (Find the unedited audio and full transcripts here.)

And my recent bar brawl with Tommy Christopher — a Mediaite blogger who has been promoting the notion that James O’Keefe’s ACORN investigation was racially motivated — in Washington D.C. during CPAC, confirms my assessment of the utter desperation of O’Keefe’s critics.

Ironically, with no tangible evidence that O’Keefe’s videos were, in fact, “heavily edited,” the left has been literally heavily editing their attack plan against him – correcting, updating, and revising their angles of assault in order to catch up with the facts. (more…)